Tuesday, December 13, 2016

Future-Oriented Paleontology at the La Brea Tar Pits

One of the things I love
best about social media is its power to connect me with strangers. When Jon
Christensen tweeted, back in November, about a panel exploring extinction and
de-extinction to be held at the La Brea Tar Pits, I tweeted back inviting him to
blog about the talk for CFM. (Jon’s an adjunct assistant professor at the Institute
of the Environment and Sustainability as well as a co-founder of the Laboratory for Environmental Narrative Strategies (LENS) at UCLA.) I was interested in the event because
the organizers promised to explore “How museum exhibitions, images and films
about them shape science, laws and policies to protect endangered species”—a
good fit for CFM’s work documenting how museums can change the world. Also, as
a futurist married to an ecologist, I’m fascinated by the ethical and practical
controversies surrounding efforts to revive extinct species.

Panelists discuss extinction and de-extinction under the jaundiced gaze of a woolly mammoth at the La Brea Tar Pits and Museum in Los Angeles. Photo courtesy of Evelyn Wendel.

It’d
be hard to imagine a better setting for talking about extinction, endangered
species, climate change, and our hopes and fears for the future. We were also surrounded
by skeletons of extinct saber-toothed cats, dire wolves, and giant ground
sloths, all found in the tar pits. These specimens from the past seemed to crowd
around the audience for a lively discussion about the future of this very place
and the planet in the face of tremendous changes in climate and ecosystems.

As
Lindsey pointed out, the tar pits are an archive of global change from the last
Ice Age to the present, a period in which dramatic changes in climate and human
influences on the landscape and species intersected. And the La Brea Tar Pits
don’t just document the demise of the charismatic megafauna that capture most
of the attention in the museum, but also have yielded millions of specimens of more
than 600 other species of vertebrates, insects, and plants that have lived here
over the past 50,000 years, many of which have adapted and survived into the
present.

The
challenge for the museum is how to make that amazing archive, which is still
being unearthed daily in ongoing excavations, and the stories it tells relevant
to today’s urgent conversations about climate change and the possibility that
we’re living through the sixth mass extinction on Earth, this one caused by us.
The panel was part of the museum’s efforts to experiment and explore the role
it can play in the future, and it was co-sponsored by UCLA’s Institute of the Environment and
Sustainability,
where Heise and I are on the faculty.

And
who better to kickstart such a conversation than Stewart Brand? Founder of the
Whole Earth Catalog and the Long Now Foundation, Brand is an advocate for expanding our
thinking to ten-thousand-year timeframes, for the future as well as the past.
Brand presented his fantastic-sounding, but utterly serious, and scientifically
possible scenario for recreating a woolly mammoth using cutting-edge gene
editing techniques. The plan is to take DNA recovered from mammoth specimens in
Siberia and place it into elephant embryos, tinkering with combinations until
we create a reasonable facsimile of a woolly mammoth that can play a role in
“rewilding” appropriate habitat in the far north. The same gene technologies
could be used to turn a band-tailed pigeon into a passenger pigeon, he said.

Lindsey
was skeptical. There have been such enormous changes in the habitat that these
species depended on, she said, that it’s hard to imagine them thriving as wild
populations. Instead of trying to recreate lost species, we might be better off
using the lessons of the past to figure out how living species can navigate a
landscape that is being transformed by humans and climate change.

Regardless
of whether “de-extinction” ever succeeds, said Heise, it’s a fascinating
narrative twist, the obverse of the gloom and doom narratives of loss that
dominate the ways we generally talk about endangered species. Brand’s vision is
a hopeful and creative one, she said, and it holds out promise that we might
redeem ourselves in some ways from the environmental damages wrought by humans.

Museums,
along with books, films, other media, and arts, have all played enormous roles
in shaping what Heise calls the “cultural imagination,” which is in many ways just
as important as the actual science of endangered species and extinction. And
museums, as well as other cultural institutions, can play important roles in
imaginatively refashioning the ways we think about conservation, too.

The
Natural History Museum has an official statement on evolution, and it is now researching a statement on
climate change. Several other natural history museums have already issued such statements.

Arguably
more important than an official statement—which, to be sure, can help the
museum work out its position—is the work of opening up the museum for
conversations about living on a changing planet. Research has shown again and
again that hammering people with facts and positions does little or nothing to
change minds, let alone open hearts.

On
the other hand, providing a window into the work of science at the La Brea Tar
Pits—part of the museum’s mission is to “inspire wonder and discovery”—and at
the same time, a place to explore the stories we tell about our role in this changing
world—might just be the ticket the museum needs to deliver on the promise of
the third part of its mission: inspiring “responsibility” for our “natural and
cultural worlds.”

You can listen to a recording
of “Extinction! Fear and Hope at the La Brea Tar Pits” at nhm.org/lectures.

1 comment:

Readers interested in a fairly comprehensive review of the current state of the science, technology, and ethics of de-extinction and its potential consequences for life on earth will enjoy M.R. O'Connor's thorough and thoughtful publication, RESURRECTION SCIENCE: Conservation, De-Extinction and Precarious Future of Wild Things (St. Martin's Press). O'Connor explores the moral dimensions of current researches aimed both at preserving existing species and recreating ones that have already perished as a consequence of human activity.